r/translator encourages people to follow the proper formatting guidelines, especially the inclusion of > in the title. However, I do want to remind the community that though our title rules are fairly strict, they also aren't draconian and not every post that doesn't meet the exact requirements gets removed. We mods have been getting a ton of reports from a few individuals on lots of posts that don't match the formatting guidelines exactly, and they are frankly, unnecessary.

It's okay for someone to submit a title like [English to Dutch] Text Paragraph, even if it doesn't have the >, as Ziwen is intentionally written to be moderately tolerant of bad formatting in post titles and to account for as many variations as possible. Same with something like Persian > English. this thing I found, even though there aren't any brackets ([, ]).

For the last two years, Ziwen has filtered out/rejected titles that match the following criteria:

1. The title does not include a target language. An example of this would be the title Translate pls.

2. The post's long title "buries the lede" and puts the target language towards the end without brackets. An example of this would be the title Could somebody please translate these two words from Japanese to English.

3. The title does not include a source language. An example of this would be the title Translate to English please.

4. The post is only for English. An example of this would be the title [English > English] "seak out" meaning. We redirect such inquiries to r/englishlearning or r/grammar.

With each rejection, Ziwen also suggests a new title for the post that would adhere to the formatting guidelines. That new title is included in a comment that's posted to the post and Ziwen automatically generates a resubmit link for the OP that pre-fills that new title in.

Ziwen already filters out many posts that don't meet the title criteria - over 24 a day last month - so unless the bot is down there's generally no need to report every single post that doesn't exactly match the [Language > Language] Description format. The bot has worked to strike a good balance between making sure posts are easily comprehensible for translators to read and allowing for users to post.

Thanks, all!

Indeed, Ziwen has removed about 10,000 posts for failing the title formatting rules since January 2018.